It is certainly true that a successful, popular, nonviolent uprising against the Libyan regime would be a greater challenge for pro-democracy forces than in Tunisia or Egypt, given that Libya is what political scientists call a "rentier state," a country that derives a substantial portion of its revenues not from the labor or its people, but from the "rent" of its natural resources to external clients.

The readership of the New York Times is the wealthy, in effect, the rentier, which is to say, he who has got to where he was going; and our paper of record, absent a constituency of the theatrically savvy, has become a champion of the moot, appealing to the intellectual pretensions of its readership.

As significant is the fact that both the USA and Britain, following the logic of neo-liberal globalization have de-industrialized and turned as a result into "rentier", mostly financial economies, outsourcing most of their production to poorer countries where labor is cheaper and less organized.

They project this wonderful result to occur only by heavy lifting, lots of punitive laws, enormous bureaucratic expenditures, and lots of payments to 'rentier' outfits like NRDC, and extraordinary efforts by 2035!

The official excuse is that it will make the national economy more competitive, and therefore overcoming its 'rentier' history; the sort of foolish assertion that could only be accompanied by an unfettered capitalist agenda.

The literature on states that depend on income from a single pricey primary commodity ( "rentier" states) finds that they seldom function as democracies (Norway is the major exception and it developed its political institutions well before it got oil).